Page 1 of Play With Me
CHAPTER1
Jude
ONE YEAR AGO
Imet the glinting-blue eyes of my foe with a narrowed gaze, my muscles tense. A strand of blond hair fell into my eyes. I tucked it back into its tie lest it distract me during battle.
Around us, the night air was biting cold, the sky speckled with a thousand stars. A small crowd had gathered, their breaths puffing steam into the night sky.
The tension in the air was taut as a tightrope.
“You got this, Cap!” my sister cheered.
My dark-haired opponent squinted, mirroring my stance. He sneered. “Victory will be mine.” Then he pulled his lips back, revealing a fierce grin of not one, but two missing teeth.
We formed our hands into tight fists, raised them up in the air, and chanted our battle cry.
“ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS!”
My six-year-old son Cap’s arm swung down, his hand balled in a fist.
Quickly, I stuck two fingers out, shifting my play from paper into scissors.
“Noooooo!” I yelled, dropping to my knees in the icy snow covering the wide expanse of lawn next to the entrance of the Rolling Hills resort, my family’s luxury hotel perched in the hills over the town of Quince Valley, Vermont.
Next to us was the resort’s parking lot, and over that and down the slope past the resort’s golf course, the curving length of the Quince River twinkled in the moonlight.
My sister Chelsea and her partner Seamus whooped. My best friend Nora—rounding out the group—quirked her lips behind the video camera she was holding.
“Ah ha!!!” Cap exclaimed. He smashed my hand in victory, then raised it up in the air. Save the shield and age difference, he looked every bit his Marvel namesake.
Last year, Jack had become so obsessed with Captain America, I’d started calling him Cap. But he’d loved it so much that he politely requested everyone call him that. Even as he’d moved on to other heroes, the nickname had stuck.
“I win! You lose! You’re a loser, Dad!”
Nora giggled behind the camera as Cap began his victory lap. But when he passed me, he shouted, “On your left!” like Cap did in the movies, and we all lost it.
I got up and brushed off my now-damp jeans, my eyes shifting to my best friend, who’d lowered the video camera she constantly had on, laughing too hard to film. She was clad in a puffy black jacket and jeans and her red hair streamed in two braids from her wool hat like Anne of Green Gables—if Anne of Green Gables was a thirty-year-old woman who wore thick Coke-bottle glasses and liked making home movies.
I loved watching Nora behind the camera, which she used constantly since Cap and I bought it for her birthday last year. It was a top-of-the-line handheld I special-ordered from Japan on the advice of a producer friend. Before that, she’d been taking phone videos.
Unlike how she normally appeared—shy, reserved, and like she wanted to shrink into the wallpaper—behind the camera she looked like I’d felt on the tennis court: in her element. The only other place I saw her like that was at the library where she worked.
It’s where we’d met two years ago. Cap and I had gone in because I had a local mystery I needed help researching: the story of a woman who’d been murdered at our hotel over a century ago. Her ghost was said to haunt our hotel, and while the actual haunting part was debatable, the story was incredible. Nora had heard of the legend and jumped at the chance to investigate with me. She was brilliant—a thousand times better at mystery-solving than me, and kind of adorable in her nerdy Anne of Green Gables way. The best part about Nora was besides the fact that she and Cap had fallen instantly in love with each other, she seemed immune to my bullshit. She didn’t giggle when I talked or try to flirt with me. I mean, she turned red when I first talked to her, but I soon learned she did that with everyone. Our friendship was easy, and because Nora wasn’t into me like that—and I didn’t date, full stop—there was none of that awkwardness that could have happened with anyone else.
I mean, I didn’t love it whenshewent on dates, but that was just because she dated boring chumps. None of them really deserved her. And sure, sometimes my brain would picture her in scenarios that weren’t entirely friend-appropriate, but that was just my ridiculous distractible brain. And hormones.
Overall, our friendship was perfect. I never wanted anything to change.
But when she glanced at me now, her smile faltered.
My stomach tightened. I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling recently that something was off with her. She’d promised there was nothing wrong, but it had been days of this. I vowed I’d pull her aside at the dinner we were all going to tonight and get her to spit it out. Nora and I could talk about anything.
Well, almost anything.
“I wonder where Cap got his competitive streak?” Chelsea mused. Chelsea was the baby in our family of five kids, the only one younger than me.
I turned back to her. “Listen, when I did that shit on the court, the crowd ate it up. Just like y’all are doing right now.”
